This is the fourteenth in a series of monthly updates we'll be posting on the last Saturday of every month (JST) until Tokyo Dark's release. If you want to follow development in more detail and you are an [ Access Pack ] + backer remember to drop into the Tokyo Dark backer's forum for our weekly updates every Saturday. If weekly and monthly updates aren't quite enough, you can follow us on Twitter or Facebook for your midweek Cherrymochi fix.

[ Dev Update ]

This month has been busy as always: we've been making great progress with development, Tokyo Dark has been part of the Square Enix booth at Gamescom, we've had tough decisions to make about our release date and have been making plans for Tokyo Game Show. It's another long update this month so grab yourself a cuppa tea and please let us know what you think in the comments.

Since wrapping up work on the background art we've been moving forward with dev at a steady pace.

Travel around Tokyo using the map interface

The map interface is now in-game and working, allowing Detective Itō to move freely around Tokyo, once a location is unlocked. We've been adding new locations, scenes and characters and had a smooth month of development with no unexpected issues - It's been lovely! (I hope I haven't cursed us now.)

Maho playtesting & working on new areas

[ Gamescom ]

Tokyo Dark has continued it's 2016 international summer tour (*^^*) and was part of the Square Enix booth at Gamescom. We couldn't get to Germany ourselves, so a huge thank you to the Square Enix Collective team who ran the Tokyo Dark booth for us! And thank you to everyone who tweeted, emailed and facebooked us from Gamescom. It's been really motivating to get such positive feedback.

photos by @SQEXCollective

[ Release schedule ]

We've had some tough decisions to make about hitting our original Kickstarter release estimate of this October. It's recently become apparent that we won't be able to finish Tokyo Dark to the level of polish we're aiming for by then. We've therefore decided to move our release date back to 2017.

Why? What's gone wrong? Who's to blame? Where are the pitch forks?⎯⎯∈

First, to be clear, production is going well. We've not hit any major roadblocks and we've been getting great feedback wherever we've shown the game. We are still on target to make Tokyo Dark exactly the game we want it to be.
During the campaign, we hit most of our stretch goals and while this has vastly improved the quality of the final game it also added a lot of extra things to do.

The anime sequences are taking longer than expected to produce, the extra locations in the stretch
goals have taken time to develop and we've had a few of the usual game-dev technical hiccups that have set us behind schedule.

With that said we're still making fantastic progress.

By October Tokyo Dark is on target to be at internal beta, fully playable (on set paths) from beginning to end. Instead of crunching to rush that build straight out and patching in fixes & features later, we want to take the
time to add content and polish the whole game to a standard we think it deserves before we launch. To do that we need more time.

When will Tokyo Dark release?

We won't state a release date until we're 100% ready to go. Once we're happy with the game Square Enix Collective will be helping us with quality assurance testing and locking down an exact date in 2017.

Until we release nothing will change. We will continue to post monthly updates on the last Saturday of every month on Kickstarter and weekly updates every Saturday on our forum, so you'll always know exactly what's happening with development.

We hope you support our decision to spend the extra time and effort to make Tokyo Dark the best game we can. We apologise to all of you who are disappointed by this change of schedule.

[ Halloween Pack ]

We know that many of you were looking forward to playing Tokyo Dark in October. So this Halloween we'll be sending out download codes to every Tokyo Dark backer (all tiers) for our [ Halloween Pack ]
this includes:

TKY0.1EP - 5 tracks from the Tokyo Dark soundtrack (320 kbps mp3s)

Art booklet PDF - A behind the scenes look the development of Tokyo Dark

New Tokyo Dark wallpaper for monitors and smartphones

Set of 35 Tokyo Dark emoticons / stamps

(This is not the same content found in the [ Digital + Pack ] which features the full length soundtrack and artbook)

[ Tokyo Game Show ]

Tokyo Game Show is only a few weeks away and we'll be there with our latest TD build. We'd love to meet you and show you exactly what we've been working on, so let us know if you're going!

Comments

Glad you're making the game polished before release, a delay or too can't be helped in order to make a good game great. Thank you for the monthly updates and the halloween pack is very generous of you. Keep up the great work.

Thank you very much for your regular updates. It's really refreshing to see a game developer being so transparent with its backers, which sadly seems to be increasingly rare these days. As for the delay and extension to the release schedule, please, take your time to polish this game to perfection. Another thing that seems rare these days is developers who actually finish their games before release rather than shoving them out in whatever half-finished form they may be in. I must particularly praise your decision to push back the release date rather than crunching to finish on time, by far the worst practice in the industry and something that needs to end. I for one would have been much more likely to pull my support and demand a refund if you *were* crunching as that is something I will not tolerate, not to mention it increasing the likelihood of the game turning out rubbish anyway. Now though, your workers can finish the game properly without killing themselves. I approve of this and won't mind the delay.

Take your time!! I'd rather have a good finished product, than a mediocre product just to fit the release schedule! ^^
I have plenty of patience since I backed Star Citizen too, and that's been in development for... Quite a while by now, haha.

Take the time you need to polish the game.
There's nothing worse than rushing a game for a set release date and having it destroyed by reviewers on release because it lacked polish. (Steam reviewers are especially good at that.)

Backers have waited quite some time now for it to be released, and I don't think they will mind waiting an extra few months if it means they have a better game in the end.
You're doing frequent updates to let you know how it's going on and we all can see you're making progress.
Honestly, this is very generous of you to give that Halloween Pack as compensation. You have my thanks for great extra content!

I agree with the others in that a delay to fix things certainly is the right decision. Every project in the industry runs into "crunch time", and I'd rather see the game come out later and better than sooner and flawed.

The Halloween Pack is a very nice gesture and more than enough "compensation" for the additional wait. Please take your time and make this the game you want it to be. ^_^

Superbacker

You are doing wonderful job and keeping us updated all the time...Pretty sure no one is upset or anything. We know you are doing your best, and we want the best game as possible. ^^
<333333333333333333333

Superbacker

Hey delays are never a bad thing you only launch a game once and darn it I want Tokyo dark to launch the best it can so you guys and gals keep working hard meanwhile I'll listen to those 5 awesome tracks you guys are generously giving us

Please don't release your game until it is finished and polished. I am SO tired of having to play games that are released unfinished just to meet a deadline (especially those huge AAA games that cost $60, but that's a different problem). I am greatly looking forward to "Tokyo Dark", but I can wait for you to release the game the way you intend it to be.

If you should feel the need to release the Gamescom/TGS build to us backers (you know, for feedback) I'm sure we would all be okay with that.

Better to delay a game and fix the bugs than to give a buggy game and get bad feedback. I approve your guys choice for delaying the game. Keep up the great work! I loved the DEMO and can't wait for the rest!

It's not a surprise, and I expected it from the start, no games or at least very few even big AAA games which should know even better if they will be done or not at a specific date, will never fprovide a specific release date more than a few months away (or at least they are very are).

Just take your time, it might frustrates some, but that's the good decision, the real rule should be to always release games when they're done. Although not in the ID Software way with Duke Nukem Forever lol.

It's all looking good, and I'm sure the result will be great. Looking forward those several more months weekly and monthly updates :)

Well, things happens and there is nothing to apologize for. I was involved in a development project too and our first assesment was to deliver in 6 to 8 months. At the end we needed 15 months to go gold because, as said, things happens....

Take all your time and remenber that backers are here to help you, if we can.

PS: can't wait for Halloween Pack. I bet it will be awesome, I can't wait for that "behind the scenes".....

Take all the time you need to make the game we all want. Seriously. After watching so many devs push out buggy unfinished games due to not wanting to upset the community, it's clear that (no matter what the rabble states) the community will be MUCH happier with a late high quality product, than with a shitshow product released "on time". In the end, "on time" is whenever you and your team feel good about the art you've spent years creating. <3

Superbacker

I honestly would rather that developers make a game they are happy with over making a game, rushing through stuff just to meet the original release date, and end up having to send out patches/fixes to correct something at a later date.

Take all the time you need. I will (im)patiently await the finished product.

Superbacker

You are late, but i will say it : "take your time and make a finished and polished ame".

I could see some small "slowdown" on the gamescom demo (could not play as someone was staying on the demo unit for WAY too long T_T'). Ay what i saw over his shoulder was a game that was looking incredible and with good writing.

For the october phone wallpaper if it's not taking too much time, can we have a "live" one for iphone 6 and + ? :p